melt QA: What’s in a Name?

meltmedia has a great quality assurance (QA) department. If you haven’t heard of us yet, you will.

Therein lies the quandary, doesn’t it? How do you begin to tell the world who you are, or better yet, what you do and why you do it? We knew right away that we had to start telling someone about the things we were doing. However, to begin we had to pick a name.

Naturally, jokes were made, the whiteboard was pulled out, brainstorming transpired. Yet as this happened and we were going through the process of trying to define ourselves with a clever moniker, we discovered we weren’t just looking for our external identity, and we had found that we had a story to tell.

You see, quality assurance teams can be found smattered across the digital industry. Usually they are functioning within the rigors and confines of these popular buzzwords: ‘strict agile’, ‘BDD’, ‘90%+ code coverage’ or some other strong methodology that defines their functions. Conversely, QA might be covered by the Development staff via code reviews and writing unit tests or via project managers during UAT, etc., because there is no actual QA department.

While we evaluated our path, we came to understand our common relation within the world of digital agencies. We felt none of those labels specifically defined what meltQA was doing, or that these things even began to cover, let alone describe what we aspire to do as a team.

So, what’s in a name? Great question! To find our label we began to look to our own internal projects. What sets us apart? The answer was buried here, in our passion to deliver quality services.

We asked ourselves: What matters most to us?

The answer? You.

You do.

There is a strong parallel in the tools we are building, to the problems people just like you might may be facing. Here are some examples:

Project managers are busy folks. The best use of their time isn’t sitting at a desk for weeks taking screenshots of a web page. All the while, cursing the powers that be because it’s hard to hover over a dropdown menu and take a picture at the same time. Much less making those pictures a uniform size so the content breakpoint is identical across the final PDF. Forget doing it on mobile. In response, meltQA built Hippo. Hippo is a screenshot tool that only requires the user to build a simple config file and then it will do the rest. Weeks of effort and hours of frustration reduced to mere minutes and one clean PDF, freeing up project managers and coordinators to do what they do best; manage projects and teams.

Have you ever tested a form across multiple browsers and devices? Not only do you have to ensure the form’s submission accuracy, but have you tried to come up with ten or more different combinations for the “first name” field? That gets tedious pretty quickly. So meltQA built Emu. Emu leverages similar logic to Hippo. The user simply has to build a config file and Emu will populate your form with randomized characters and will submit your data as many times as your heart desires and faster than you can say “Quality Assurance”.

Falcon came next. Falcon is a powerful screen compare tool to illustrate the key differences between two sets of images. Are you sick of checking content between environments every time you make an update to your website? Falcon was built to solve exactly that issue.

meltmedia is branching out to partner with powerful content management systems like AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) and Acquia/Drupal. In employing these robust systems, we realized we could build in tests for components that are inherent to these platforms. This greatly reduces QA time and ultimately saves our clients (You!) time and money.

I think you’re starting to get the drift.

We’ll cover more of our tools in depth within future posts. We hope you join us for that. During the collaborative recognition of our main priorities it became clear that our name had to be the Best Use of Humans.

Why?

Because the best of humans isn’t you sitting in front of a computer and doing things you could better leave to our team, our automation and our passion for delivering efficient and quality services. Your time is valuable and we want to be the first to recognize that. At meltmedia, we want to make sure your website, applications and software run smoothly, also, that it is bug free. The meltQA team has decided to take the initiative to go one step further in streamlining all processes throughout the project to make your experience with us more stress free and cost effective.